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I’m mere months from the publication of my next novel, The Crossing, and part of the revision process involves early readers. One in particular, Kristin, I can always count on to blast me with the unadulterated truth, the kind that makes me go back and rewrite the beginning. Again. But I trust her, and I know she’s not going to steer me wrong. However brutal it might have been to hear that my first paragraph was too precious, I had to admit she was right.

So I’ve been deep in revisions for a while, and I’m looking forward to that moment I read through the entire document and think, yeah, I’m done.

(As much as any artist can ever be done. Wasn’t it Degas who kept trying to work on his paintings even after he’d sold them?)

Kristin has read The Crossing more than once. I think she’s read it five times, actually–twice recently, twice the first time around, and once in between. She’s a careful reader, and thoughtful, and she’s not afraid to mince words (as evidenced by her “your first paragraph is too precious” comment, as well as a few other choice remarks). But what struck her the most about her latest read-through, she said, was that she really “felt the years.” Kristin read the first draft of The Crossing back in 2006, and now it’s 2013 and I’m still living with the same voices in my head. She wondered what it would feel like to write this book, to have a twenty-year relationship with certain characters (Joel first came to me so long ago I’d rather blush than mention my age). How could I still connect with them?

Oh, but I can. I slip into their heads so easily. I think about them so often, in fact, that I know the people who love me most think I’m a bit crazy.

So much of the time I’m somewhere else.

But I honestly can’t help myself.

And I don’t know that I want to change.

Does this mean I can’t be there for my friends? That my son doesn’t get my undivided attention later today when he comes home from summer camp and wants to race his radio-controlled cars with me? That I’m incapable of a connected conversation?

Absolutely not. But it might mean that you have to say my name more than once.

Because I might be thinking about that swing scene, the one where Joel says that he can “feel something building, a restlessness, a shiver of impatience.”

Or I might have in my mind the moment Joel meets Adam, and says, “His eyes, even in the dim light of the bar, knock me out.” (You know all about Adam if you’ve read I, too, Have Suffered in the Garden–and if you haven’t read that novel yet, OH. You so should. Click here to purchase.)

Or I might be thinking ahead, to the next novel, the one I’m already writing.

Tantalized?

I am. I always am. And each short story, each vignette, each photograph, feels that much more provocative than the last.

Twenty plus years and counting.

I have no intention of turning back.

p.s. Do you ever get lost in your head? Are you a writer, a photographer, an artist, a musician, an engineer? Tell me what you do and what that feels like in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

Every book club has its own dynamic, and I’m always curious to see how readers will respond to what I’ve written. This particular group was really stuck on Adam’s infidelity. We’re very conservative Christians, one woman said, which might have made me jump to the conclusion that their issue would be Adam’s sexual orientation. But that wasn’t the case. They didn’t like the betrayal of the commitment Adam had made to Joel; some of them, in fact, seemed downright angry. Though they eventually understood Adam’s motivation, his affair made them like him a little less.

Maybe even a lot less.

I get it. Adam’s behavior, especially when viewed outside of the context of his relationship with Bobby–his former lover who died of AIDS when Adam was twenty-five–seems pretty appalling.

Of course, we only see Adam’s perspective. That’s what happens when something is written in first-person. In I, too, Have Suffered in the Garden, you’re in Adam’s head. And along with his viewpoint come his baggage and biases.There’s not a lot of space for anything else.

In The Crossing, coming to you later this summer, you’ll be able to get inside Joel’s head.

Of course, Joel has his own issues, his own baggage. He makes his own terrible decisions. You may be totally annoyed at times by his inertia, or his self-destructive tendencies.

At the same time, everything will start to click: Adam’s relationship with Joel, Joel’s relationship with James, James’s relationship with Adam. They’re all so intertwined, and it’s messy and complicated and actually kind of rich.

I promised to tell you more about my photo shoot. But I’ve been holding back.

I could lie, and say that I’ve been keeping those magnificent photos all to myself, but that’s not the truth.

I haven’t looked at them even once.

A few years ago, just before I published I, too, Have Suffered in the Garden, I scrawled one hundred pages’ worth of what will eventually be my third novel. Then I got busy publishing and promoting, and then I went back to The Crossing, which you’ll get to read later this year. Those hundred pages of my third novel I saved on my laptop, and I’ve only looked at them one time since.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about Joel and James and Adam, or what’s happening to them. I think about them all the time. But reading through those pages: that brings me too close. Until I have the time to work on that novel in successive days, there’s no point in opening the document. If I do, if I read those pages again and again for my own gratification, then by the time I can really sit down and work, the words I’ve written might be dead to me.

I’m not willing to take the risk.

I feel the same way about the photographs from my shoot. For more than a week I’ve had an email in my inbox from Amie King, the friend who hooked me up with Josh Baker of AzulOx Photography. The subject line? Top Ten. She’s given me her ten favorite photos from the three hundred Josh took, and she wants to know mine.

But I’ve been delaying gratification.

That shoot was just so fantastic, and the photographs themselves are so enthralling, that I don’t want to treat them lightly. I want to look at them; of course I do. But I want to do so with reverence. I want to lock myself up in the darkness of my closet (which from a metaphorical standpoint I find pretty hysterical), and just let myself go.

At the same time, I don’t want them to lose their glitter. And I know that the more I look at them, the more I lose that moment when everything is so new I’m breathless.

I have more to tell you: about the spring, about the last-minute revisions I’m going to make to my novel because of what Addison and Evan brought to the shoot. About what I have coming for you later this summer.

If I let myself, I could spend my entire life reliving those six years. If I let myself, I could crawl inside and never come out.

I’ve had the same feeling the past few days, as I’ve scrolled through the photos from my shoot last Thursday; I have the same feeling about my work in general. If I let myself, I could crawl inside and never come out.

Sometimes it takes a seriously concerted effort to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Last Thursday a cold front swept through Austin, breaking all kinds of records for the date. But instead of freaking out as I shivered on my deck that afternoon, I couldn’t stop smiling. The scene we were shooting takes place late in October. Of course the universe would deliver up a blustery day to match.

Josh Baker of AzulOx Photography showed up at Zilker Park ready to work. I hadn’t known what to expect; I’d never worked with Josh, and I had no idea how I was going to marry the vision I had in my head with what Josh might be thinking. He hadn’t wanted to read the scene ahead of time; instead he wanted the barest of directions (tunnel under Barton Springs Road, for example), and emotion (desire, guilt, attraction). But I could see from the beginning that he was willing to do whatever it took to get the perfect shot.

What really blew me away, though, was that Josh disappeared into his work the same way I disappear into mine. I could tell by the expression on his face, and the way he was setting up. I could tell by the way he answered my questions, and talked to his assistant, Austin.

Except that we were working on a scene that I had created, so in a way it felt like we were disappearing together.

I stood at the back of the tunnel, Josh sprawled on the ground in front of me, belly down on the tracks. Ahead of us, James (Addison Roush) leaned against the railing. Across from him, Joel (Evan Shaw) lit a cigarette. Josh started shooting (click, click, click) and I couldn’t help myself. Holy shit, I said. Because this scene, the one I’ve had in my head for so many years that Zilker Park has become synonymous with this moment between Joel and James, came alive right before my eyes.

I mentioned in my last post that Evan Shaw, an actor currently studying at David Mamet’s Atlantic Acting School in New York, was a pro from the very beginning. How do you feel about a wig? I wrote to him in an email as we were preparing for the shoot, and he said, I’ll wear whatever you want. Are you going to be too cold? I wrote on Thursday morning, and he wrote back, I’ll keep warm, don’t worry. He was too focused on the character to let himself get preoccupied with anything else, and he took up the role the second he stepped into the tunnel.

Playing opposite him was my own version of a Hail Mary, a friend of a friend of a friend who said he was willing to step in after the actor I had previously booked canceled on me. I actually considered having a third actor on set, just in case Addison couldn’t deliver.

That would have been a bad decision. Addison could not have been any more nonchalant about the role–or any more perfect.

The chemistry between Evan and Addison was so tantalizing, and the photos were so beautiful–Josh stopped every so often so I could see the magic he was conjuring and tell him what I wanted to see next–that I decided to go with a little more light. My original idea was to keep the actors in shadow, because when I read a book I want to use my imagination. And while Addison is very much like James, and Evan is very much like Joel, neither actor looks exactly the way I envision those characters. But when Josh gave Evan and Addison more light this happened.

Are you in awe yet? I am. Just writing this post I can feel myself sinking deeper into this world.

I have more to share with you, I promise. You’ll want to see some of the shots from the spring. But you’ll have to stay tuned.

A friend of mine has been doing some writing lately, conjuring up her past and mining it for meaning. I’ve known Amie for almost ten years, but we didn’t connect that often until she started emailing me with questions. How do I manage my fear that what I’m writing might offend someone? How do I get out of my characters’ heads? What’s the best way to write a compelling sex scene? Her questions were insightful and curious, and I had such fun answering them, almost as much fun as I had reading her work, which is all about music and seduction and sex.

Then Amie emailed to say that a friend of hers, the fabulous photographer Josh Baker, wanted to play around with one of the scenes from my novel, The Crossing, which comes out this summer. So I met with him, and he was just as engaging and focused and creative in person as I might have assumed from seeing his work.

And suddenly I had a photo shoot on my calendar.

Initially I thought I wanted to do something without actors. After all, readers generally like to use their imaginations when they’re envisioning a character, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to a certain “look” before The Crossing is even published. But while Josh was willing to let me try to recreate Joel and James’s living room, I knew that working with models would be so much more provocative for him. And since Josh can create a rain storm on a clear night, I figured I should trust him when he said he could shadow the shots so that the models themselves are a mere suggestion but the chemistry would bleed through.

Of course, for that kind of chemistry I knew I needed some stellar actors. So I started searching.

I looked through a LOT of head shots. But Evan Shaw I kept coming back to. I could see that he was every bit the professional I needed. When he read the scene in question he said he could really sympathize with Joel’s longing and vulnerability. That didn’t surprise me, given the photo he’d sent.

Now I’m gearing up for the shoot itself: a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, a pack of Marlboros. I’m keeping an eye on the weather, which so far looks like it’s going to be a little cool for the date (how perfect, given that the scene actually takes place in October). I’m trying to find out if Evan has a pair of boots, the kind that Joel describes as “heavy Redwings I’ve worn so often that the leather has softened like a kiss” and that Shelton, James’s homophobic fraternity brother, says makes him think Joel’s “plunging toilets or nailing A-frames in his spare time.”

You want to hear how this photo shoot goes? Then you should check back in.

And in the meantime, if there’s a scene from my fiction that you’d love to see re-created, comment below. I just might be able to make it happen.